SOME farm-boys were having a happy Sunday in the woods gathering black birch and wintergreens. As they lay on the cool moss, lazily tasting the spicy morsels they had found and gazing up at the patches of blue sky through the beeches, one of the boys caught sight of a small, bluish bird, with an odd white spot on its wing, as it flashed through the trembling leaves. In a moment it was gone, but the boy was on his feet, looking after it with eyes that had opened on a new world.

So “Deacon Woods,” the old familiar playground that he thought he knew so well, where blue-jays, woodpeckers, and yellow-birds were every-day companions, contained wonders of which he had never dreamed. The older brothers knew nothing and cared nothing about the unknown bird. What difference did it make, anyway? But the little lad of seven who followed its flight with startled, wondering eyes seemed to have been born again. His eyes were opened to many things that had not existed for him before.

Do you remember the story of the monk of long ago who, while copying in his cell a page from the Holy Book, chanced to ponder on the words that tell us that a thousand years in God’s sight are but as a day? As the monk wondered and doubted how such a thing might be, he heard through his window the song of a strange, beautiful bird, and followed it through the garden into the woods beyond. Wandering on and listening, with every sense alive to the delights about him, it seemed that he had spent the happiest hour he had ever known. But when he returned to his monastery, he found himself a stranger in a place that had long forgotten him. He had been wandering for a hundred years in the magic wood, listening to the song of the wonderful bird.

In somewhat the same way John Burroughs followed where the gleam of the little bluish warbler led him through woods and fields for more than seventy years. That is why Time missed him out of the great reckoning. One who listens to the song of life knows nothing of age or change. So it is that the boy John never slipped away from Burroughs, the man. So it is that the Seer of Woodchuck Lodge is eighty years young.

Do you know what it means to be a seer? A seer is one who has seeing eyes which clearly note and comprehend what most people pass a hundred times nor care to see. He looks, too, through the outer shell or appearance of things, and learns to read something of their hidden meaning. He has sight, then, and also insight. He looks with his physical eyes and also with the eyes of the mind and spirit.

We always think of a seer as an old man, but little John Burroughs—John o’ Birds, as some one has called him—began to be “an eye among the blind” that Sunday in the woods when he was a lad of seven. He led a new, charmed life as he weeded the garden and later plowed the fields. He saw and heard life thrilling about him on every side, and all that he saw became part of his own life. He drank in the joy of the bobolink and the song-sparrow with the air he breathed, as the warm sunshine and good, earth smell of the freshly turned furrow entered at every pore.

Another day almost as memorable as that which brought the flash of the strange bird was the one which gave him a glimpse into the unexplored realm of ideas. A lady visiting at the farm-house noticed a boyish drawing of his, and said, “What taste that boy has!” Taste, then, might belong to something besides the food that one took into one’s mouth. It seemed that there were new worlds of words—and thoughts—of which his farmer folk little dreamed.

Again, one day when watching some roadmakers down by the school-house turn up some flat stones, he heard a man standing by exclaim, “Ah, here we have, perhaps, some antiquities!” Antiquities! How the word rang in his fancy for days! Oh, the magic lure of the world of words!

It seemed that school and books might give him the freedom of that world. He went to the district school at Roxbury, New York, summers until he was ten, when his help was needed on the farm. After that, he was permitted to go only during the winters. In many ways he was the odd one of the family, and his unaccountable interest in things that could never profit a farmer often tried the patience of his hard-working father.

One day the boy asked for money to buy an algebra. What was an algebra, anyway, and why should this queer lad be demanding things that his father and brothers had never had? John got the algebra, and other precious books beside, but he earned the money himself by selling maple sugar. He knew when April had stirred the sap in the sugar-bush a week or more before any one else came to tap the trees, and his early harvest always found a good market.

And what a joyous time April was! “I think April is the best month to be born in,” said John Burroughs. “One is just in time, so to speak, to catch the first train, which is made up in this month. My April chickens are always the best.... Then are heard the voices of April—arriving birds, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sun-down, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising from the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny slopes. April is my natal month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two syllables are like the calls of the first birds—like that of the phoebe-bird or of the meadow-lark.”

The keen joy in the feel of the creative sunlight and springing earth—the eager tasting of every sight and sound and scent that the days brought—were not more a part of his own throbbing life than the desire to know and understand. When he was fifteen he had the promise that he might go to the academy in a neighboring town. That fall, as he plowed the lot next the sugar-bush, each furrow seemed to mark a step on the way.

When the time drew near, however, it proved as strange and unusual a desire as that for the algebra. The district school had been good enough for his brothers. So he put his disappointment behind him as he went for another winter to the Roxbury school. “Yet I am not sure but I went to Harpersfield after all,” said Mr. Burroughs; “the long, long thoughts, the earnest resolve to make myself worthy, the awakening of every part and fiber of me, helped me on my way as far, perhaps, as the unattainable academy could have done.”

The next year found the youth of seventeen teaching a country school for eleven dollars a month and “board around.” How homesick he felt for the blue hills at home, for the old barn, with the nests of the swallows and phoebe-birds beneath its roof, for the sugar-bush, and the clear, laughing trout-streams. He could see his mother hurrying through her churning so that she might go berrying on the sunny slope of Old Clump, and he knew what she brought back with the strawberries—dewy dreams of daisies and buttercups, lilting echoes of bobolinks and meadow-larks.

In October the long term was over and he went home with nearly all his earnings,—over fifty dollars,—enough to pay his way at the Hedding Literary Institute for the winter term.

In the spring of 1855 he went to New York City for the first time, hoping to find a position as teacher. He was not successful in this quest, but the trip was memorable for a raid on the second-hand book-stalls. He reached home some days later “with an empty pocket and an empty stomach, but with a bagful of books.”

Always attracted chiefly to essays, the works of Emerson influenced him greatly. He absorbed their spirit as naturally and completely as he had absorbed the sights and sounds of his native hill-country. His first article—an essay called “Expression,” which was printed without signature in The Atlantic Monthly—was by many attributed to Emerson. Lowell, who was at that time editor of The Atlantic, told, with much amusement, that before accepting the contribution he had looked through all of Emerson’s works expecting to find it and confound this plagiarizing Burroughs with a proof of his rascality.

While teaching school near West Point he one day found, in the library of the Military Academy, a volume of Audubon—and entered upon his kingdom. Here was a complete chart of that bird world which he had never ceased to long to explore since that memorable day when he had seen the little blue warbler. There was time, too, for long walks, time to live with the birds—to revive old ties as well as to make new friends.

In speaking of his study of the birds, Mr. Burroughs once said:

“What joy the birds have brought me! How they have given me wings to escape the tedious and deadly. Studied the birds? No, I have played with them, camped with them, summered and wintered with them. My knowledge of them has come to me through the pores of my skin, through the air I have breathed, through the soles of my feet, through the twinkle of the leaves and the glint of the waters.”

At once he felt a longing to write something of the joy he was gaining through this comradeship with his feathered friends. There was nothing that spoke of Emerson or any other model in his pages now. He had found his own path. He was following the little blue bird into a world of his own.

A chance came to go to Washington to live. For several years, while working as a clerk in the Treasury, he spent all his spare moments with the birds. He knew what nests were to be found near Rock Creek and along Piney Branch. It seemed that he heard the news as soon as a flock of northbound songsters stopped to rest for a day or two in the Capitol grounds.

While watching a vault where great piles of the Nation’s gold lay stored, he lived over in memory the golden days of his boyhood spent in climbing trees, tramping over hills, and through grassy hollows, or lying with half-shut eyes by the brookside to learn something of the life-story of the birds. There were leisure afternoons which brought no duty save that of sitting watchful before the iron wall of the vault. At such times he often tried to seize some of the happy bits that memory brought, a twig here, a tuft there, and now a long, trailing strand—stray scraps of observation of many sorts—which he wove together into a nest for his brooding fancy. And we, too, as we read those pages hear the “wandering voice” of the little bird of earth and sky, who wears the warm brown of one on his breast and the blue of the other on his wings; we see the dauntless robin a-tilt on the sugar-bush; we catch the golden melody of the wood-thrush—and “the time of singing birds” has come to our hearts. He has not only seeing eyes, but an understanding heart, this seer and lover of the birds, and so his bits of observation have meaning and value. He called the book in which these various bird-papers were gathered together “Wake Robin,” the name of a wild-flower that makes its appearance at the time of the return of the birds.

This book was well named, not only because it suggested something of the spirit and feeling of the essays, but also because it was the herald of several other delightful volumes such as “Signs and Seasons,” “Winter Sunshine,” “Birds and Poets.”

Do you remember how Emerson says in his poem “Each and All”

When John Burroughs writes about the birds, he brings with their life and song the feeling of the “perfect whole”—the open fields, the winding river, the bending sky, and the cool, fragrant woods. For he always gives, with the glimpses of nature that he culls, something of himself, something of his own clear-seeing, open-hearted appreciation.

The ten years spent in Washington were memorable not only for his first success as a nature writer, but also for the experiences brought through the Civil War and his friendship with the “good gray poet,” Walt Whitman. Years after, Mr. Burroughs said that his not having gone into the army was probably the greatest miss of his life. He went close enough to the firing-line on one occasion to hear “the ping of a rifle-bullet overhead, and the thud it makes when it strikes the ground.” Surely there should be enough of the spirit of his grandfather, who was one of Washington’s Valley Forge veterans, to make a soldier! How well he remembered the old Continental’s thrilling tales as they angled for trout side by side, graybeard and eager urchin of nine! How well he remembered the hair-raising stories of witches and ghosts that made many shadowy spots spook-ridden. He had learned to stand his ground in the woods at nightfall, and at the edge of the big black hole under the barn, and so to put to flight the specters before and the phantoms behind. But when, that night on the battle-field, he saw a company of blue-coated men hurrying toward a line of rifle-flashes that shone luridly against the horizon, he concluded that his grandfather had “emptied the family powder-horn” in those Revolutionary days, and that there was no real soldier stuff in the grandson.

If his failure to enlist in the army was the greatest miss of his life, his friendship with Whitman was its greatest gain. They took to the open road together, the best of boon companions, and Burroughs came to know the poet as he knew the birds. His essay “The Flight of the Eagle,” is one of the most spirited and heartfelt tributes that one great man ever paid another.

One should, however, hear Mr. Burroughs talk about the poet and watch his kindling enthusiasm. He had been teaching us how to roast shad under the ashes of our camp-fire one day when a chance remark put him in a reminiscent mood. We all felt that evening as if we had come in actual touch with the poet.

“You see,” our host concluded, “Whitman was himself his own best poem—a man, take him all in all. Do you remember how George Eliot said of Emerson, ‘He is the first man I have ever met’? Many people felt that way about Whitman.”

As I looked at Whitman’s friend I found myself thinking, “Surely here is a man, take him all in all—a man in whom the child’s heart, the youth’s vision, the poet’s enthusiasm, the scientist’s faithfulness, and the thinker’s insight, are all wonderfully blended.”

After the years in Washington, his work as a bank examiner made Mr. Burroughs seek a place for his home near New York City. The spot selected was a small farm on the Hudson, not far from Poughkeepsie, which he called Riverby. Here, in his eager delight over the planting of his roof-tree, he helped, so far as his time permitted, in the building, placing many of the rough-hewn stones himself. He tells with some relish a story of the Scotch mason, who, on looking back one evening as he was being ferried across to his home on the east shore of the river, saw, to his great anger another man at work on his job. Returning in fury to see why he had been supplanted, he surprised the owner himself in the act of putting in place some of the stones for the chimney.

“Weel, you are a hahndy malm!” he exclaimed.

The big river never appealed to Mr. Burroughs, however, as the friendly Pepacton and the other silver-clear streams where he had caught trout as a boy. It brought too close the noise of the world, the fever of getting and spending. Besides, its rising and ebbing tides, its big steamers and busy tugs, its shad and herring, were all strange to him; his boyhood home had known nothing of these things.

He built for himself a bark-covered retreat some two miles back from the river in a bowl-shaped hollow among the thickly wooded hills. “Slabsides,” as he called this human bird’s-nest, was a two-story shack of rough-hewn timbers.

“One of the greatest pleasures of life is to build a house for one’s self,” he said; “there is a peculiar satisfaction even in planting a tree from which you hope to eat the fruit or in the shade of which you hope to repose. But how much greater the pleasure in planting the roof-tree, the tree that bears the golden apples of hospitality. What is a man’s house but his nest, and why should it not be nest-like, both outside and in, snug and well-feathered and modeled by the heart within?”

Many guests climbed the steep, rocky trail and enjoyed the hospitality of this retreat, among others President Roosevelt and his wife. The naturalist, whom Colonel Roosevelt affectionately called “Oom John,” cooked the dinner himself, bringing milk and butter from his cave refrigerator, broiling the chicken, and preparing the lettuce, celery, and other vegetables which grew in the rich black mold of the hollow. As he prepared and served the meal with all the ease of a practised camper there was never a halt in the talk of these two great lovers of the outdoor world. If the poet-sage who deplored that

could have spent a day with John Burroughs, he would have found one man, at least, who never knew the tyranny of possessions, and so was never possessed by them. He is the type of the sane, happy human being who, while journeying through life, has taken time to live by the way. He knows the enchanting by-paths of existence, the friendly trails that wind over meadows and hills.

“I am in love with this world,” he says; “I have nestled lovingly in it. It has been home. I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvests, I have waited upon its seasons, and always have I reaped what I have sown. While I delved, I did not lose sight of the sky overhead. While I gathered its bread and meat for my body, I did not neglect to gather its bread and meat for my soul.”

Though the whole wide out-of-doors is home to John Burroughs, there is one spot that is more than any other the abiding-place of his affections. This is the country of his childhood in the Catskills. Here he spends his summers now at Woodchuck Lodge, a cottage about half a mile from the old homestead. Here he is happy in a way that he can be nowhere else. The woods and fields are flesh of his flesh, the mountains are father and mother to him.

A day with John Burroughs at Woodchuck Lodge will always seem torn from the calendar of ordinary living, a day apart, free, wholesome, and untouched by petty care. His world is indeed “so full of a number of things” that all who come within the spell of its serene content are “as happy as kings.”

As he makes whistles of young shoots of dogwood for his small grandson he tells of his school-days, when necessity taught his hand the cunning to make his own pens, slate-pencils, and ink-wells. “And they were a very good sort, too,” he adds. “Those were home-made days. I remember my homespun shirts, made of our own flax, yellow at first and as good as ever hair-shirt could have been in the way of scratching penance. All my playthings were home-made. How well I remember my trout-lines of braided horsehair, and the sawmill in the brook that actually cut up the turnips, apples, and cucumbers that I proudly fed it.”

“These, too, are home-made days of the best sort,” we think as we look about the rustic porch and chairs made of silvery birch, and at the silver-haired seer, surrounded by his grandchildren and the friends who gather about him with the happy feeling of being most entirely at home.

“You like my chairs with the bark on?” he says. “It’s a sort of hobby of mine to see how the natural forks and crooks and elbows which I discover in the saplings and tree-boles can be coaxed into serving my turn about the house, and I make it a point to use them as nearly as possible as they grow.”

We sit on the porch at his feet, watching the chipmunks frisk along the fences and the woodchucks creep furtively out of their holes. We do not speak for several long minutes, because we want to taste the quiet life he loves in the heart of the blue hills. We fancy that we can hear in the twitter of the tree-tops a clearly understood mingling of familiar voices, and that we feel in our hearts an answering echo that proves us truly akin to the creatures in feathers and fur.

“Home sights and sounds are best of all,” says our friend, as he gazes across at the purple shadows on Old Clump. “The sublime beauty of the Yosemite touched me with wonder and awe, but when I heard the robin’s note it touched my heart. Bright Angel Creek in the Grand CaÑon found its way into the innermost recesses of my consciousness in the moment when it reminded me of the trout-stream at home.”

There is another pause, in which the silver-clear notes of the vesper-sparrow come to us with their “Peace, good will and good night.”

“I think I am something like a turtle in the way I love to poke about in narrow fields,” he adds whimsically; “but why should I rush hither and yon to see things when I can see constellations from my own door-step?”

And so it is indeed true that the Seer of Woodchuck Lodge can still find in a ramble among his own hills the land of wonder and beauty which he found as a boy when he followed the flash of the unknown bird, and in the glowing twilight of his years, with eyes that look into the heart and meaning of things, can, from his door-step, trace constellations undreamed of by day.